Archives for May 2012

The Affiliate Ball, taking place during Affiliate Summit East 2012 in New York City, has announced some details about the upcoming event.

The networking event is being called Neverblue Presents The Affiliate Ball, as Neverblue has been secured as the title sponsor.

The Affiliate Ball has booked legendary DJ of the Beastie Boys, Mix Master Mike, to perform a set.

Many more surprise guests will be announced as the event gets closer. The party last summer, during Affiliate Summit East 2011, was featured on TMZ with hip hop legends Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Cas and Dougie Fresh performing.

This year they plan to have Ice-T and his wife, Coco, walking around the crowd to shake hands, take pictures with guests, and host the entire night on stage.

Affiliate Summit Central 2012, the first Affiliate Summit in Austin, TX, kicked off with the official welcome party on May 14, 2012 with live music from The Cody Jasper Band, Sam Sliva and the Good, and FallenAsh.

The first day of the conference started at an early (by Affiliate Summit standards) 7am, when registration opened up.

Full pass holders got a limited edition Affiliate Summit t-shirt.

Emcee Heather Romiti began the day with some announcements before turning things over to Maribel Sierra, Social Media and Communities Director, Listening and Engagement at Dell.

This first day also included a Meet Market, two sets of sessions, and Ask the Experts Roundtables, which were complemented by Nate the Great, a local balloon artist.

The first day finished up with ShareASale.com hosting their traditional Under the Stars party for conference attendees.

The second and final day kicked off with a drum circle, organized by Benjy Portnoy, to wake up attendees.

This was followed by a series of sessions in a new, truncated format where they only lasted 20 minutes each.

The conference finished up with open networking after an intensive day and a half off fun and business.

I’ve been on a long journey with Dell products that began back in the mid-1990s. I have continued buying Dell machines for my business and family, because they’ve been reliable, easy, and fast.

My latest computer is the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook, which is just a gorgeous, light, and speedy laptop. I was excited to get this one as a gift from Dell to share my candid views of it.

I got a chance to meet a bunch of the folks at Dell in 2010 when I was selected to sit on their inaugural Customer Advisory Panel, so thank you to them for sending the XPS 13 my way.

Anyhow, on to the XPS 13 – it’s amazing to see how Dell has evolved from some of those back-breaking laptops I used to haul around years ago.

This beauty weighs less than 3 pounds and it’s less than a quarter inch thick, which is not so much more than an iPad.

I think this is significant, because I’ve been hearing from lots of people that they travel with their iPad over a laptop these days. Personally, I want and need the power that comes with a laptop over a tablet.

Some other specs I like are the backlit keyboard, nearly 9 hours of battery time, and the HD display (Corning Gorilla Glass – nice when it encounters my rough travel and my 4 rough kids).

It’s also got a machined aluminum body and carbon fiber base. Now that doesn’t really mean anything to me, but I like the way it looks, and the fact that this enables it to be light and cool to the touch.

Now for the guts of it – the XPS 13 boots super fast with it’s SSD (solid state drive) and Intel Rapid Start Technology. They’re available with 2nd generation Intel Core i7 processors.

The base model runs $999 with 4 GB of memory, a 128 GB solid state drive, and it runs on Windows 7.

As far as ports, it’s got two USB ports and one Mini DisplayPort.

I was going to say my one issue with the XPS 13 is that I often take my laptop to use for presentations with my projector, and the projector uses a VGA connector.

But I just searched and found that I can just grab an adapter for pretty cheap to run the XPS 13 to my projector. Nice.

This was a conference session titled Simplify the Web to Achieve Your Goals from Affiliate Summit East 2010, which took place August 15-17, 2010 in New York City.

Speaker:

Chris Pearson, Overlord, DIYthemes, LLC

Session description: Content Management Systems (CMS), themes, templates, SEO—AAAAHHHHHH! Initially, it all seems very confusing, but today, we’re going to simplify the Web and learn what it REALLY takes to dominate.

Session description: WordPress provides an excellent foundation for SEO, but there are many ways to improve it. I’ll present key techniques and powerful plugins that can supercharge a WordPress site for SEO.

If you are interested in passes listed on eBay, please be sure to contact Affiliate Summit to confirm that the pass can be transferred.

All registrations have an associated reference number. Request this number from the seller, as well as the name on the registrations, and provide it in your e-mail to the Affiliate Summit registration team, so they can determine whether the pass in question is transferable.

Also, please note that the transaction is between you and the seller for any registration purchases on the secondary market. None of these passes are being sold by myself or anybody else that works for Affiliate Summit. Please ask any questions about the pass to the seller through eBay.

Thumbtack.com, in partnership with the Kauffman Foundation, has released data indicating that Idaho, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah are the friendliest states towards small businesses.

Small business owners gave California, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Vermont the lowest ratings.

The Thumbtack.com Small Business Survey drew data from a nationwide universe of job creators and entrepreneurs to investigate the best places in the country to do business.

Some key findings from the survey:

Texas had three of the top five cities (Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin), while California was home to the bottom three (Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento).

Small businesses said licensing requirements were nearly twice as important as tax rates in determining overall business-friendliness.

Among small business owners nationally, women were 9% more likely than men to feel supported by their state governments.

An important predictor of small business friendliness was whether small business owners are aware of the state or local government offering training programs for small businesses.

Nationwide, small businesses owned by politically conservative entrepreneurs were 17% healthier than small businesses owned by politically liberal entrepreneurs.

Idaho, Nevada and Delaware had the most small business-friendly tax codes; California and New Mexico had the least-friendly tax codes.

Nebraska small business owners were the most optimistic about their business improving during 2012, while Iowans were the least optimistic.

The South was the most small business-friendly region of the country, while New England was rated the least small business-friendly.

See the full results, which include full sets of rankings, dozens of easily searchable quotes from small businesses nationwide, regional comparisons within states, and Census data comparing states’ and cities’ key demographics against those of other states and cities.